Global warming and climate change have created a serious changes in different regions all over the world including Iran. It has intensified drought stress and water shortage that negatively affect growth and development of crop plants including rice, and threats sustainable crop production and food security. As rice-based cropping systems mostly relied on growing irrigated-lowland rice in most of rice growing countries as well as Iran, which use large amounts of fresh water, therefore, there is a need to change the rice-based cropping systems as to use less water while mainting high productivity. Therefore, possibility for changing rice-based cropping systems from continuous irrigated system to aerobic, using aerobic rice genotypes, which have been developed for water-shortage conditions could be considered in Iran. Today, a improved aerobic rice genotypes have been developed with highergrain yield about 11 t.ha-1 and less than 50% water use as compared to the irrigated lowland cultivars. Research on development and growing of aerobic rice in Iran has showed that there is potential for growing such rice genotypes in water-shortage periods as well as in rotation with other winter crops in different areas that rice can be grown but water availability is limited. Therefore, in this review, we discuss the advantages of aerobic rice development and production in different countries including Iran.